So rather than reading all the posts I thought I’d contribute a little 🙂 I’d be interested to hear if anyone has had a similar experience to what I had the other week

For the past few months I’ve worked in Norway connecting out of GVA with KLM. One evening I went to the assigned gate for my flight to TRF and not looking assuming the gate was correct I boarded via the empty automatic sky priority lane. The red light pinged, My boarding pass was checked and I was waved onboard.

Once boarding was almost complete a colleague phoned me, I thought the call was to tell me he’d been bumped to the front… well… it was actually to ask where I was sitting as I wasn’t next to him and he knew I was ‘on board’. I’d actually boarded a flight to ARN with final boarding completed.

I managed to get off and run a marathon from B to C and board the correct flight. In the process I was ‘told off’ by one of the gate agents.

This should not happen and is a serious breach of security. AT Zurich a year or so ago, I accidentally went to the automatic priority gate for the Swiss flight to LCY instead of LHR. The gate did not open and the light went red and within seconds an agent came to me. Quickly pointed out my mistake and off I went to the right gate next door.

However your comment “The red light pinged” aroused my curiosity as it should have gone green to allow you through and the agent should have come to you immediately. I’d report this to the head of security, Ruben Jiminez at GVA Airport.

I boarded a flight from D F Malan to DUR instead of to JNB in the pre-dawn gloom many years ago when it was all stil manual and the two flights boarded from adjacent gates and the two aircraft were next to each other on the tarmac.

I only realised when I heard the captain’s briefing and by that time it would have been too late to deplane me without major disruption, so they flew me to Durban and then up to Joeys on the FRAV flight.

I had a superb breakfast at the airport lounge, compliments of SAA, and missed the morning of an exruciatingly boring and pointless meeting. What a superb outcome, and as a result of a subsequent chain of events, I eventually got sacked, which was even better as I’d wanted to leave anyway but that precipitated it and they had to pay me out.

I recall in the very early days of easyJet at Luton the morning Edinburgh & Glasgow flights would often be on stands 9 & 9L (ie: next door). Pax would walk across the apron, often intermingled and then were meant to self-segregate by following the big orange signs hung above the walkway. Inevitably people weren’t looking where they were going & I couldn’t count the number of times when making the boarding PA that there would be gasps of shock & desperation when they realised they were on the wrong aircraft, and then there would be the runners between the aircraft before another headcount before we would race our colleagues north.
Fun days!

A few years ago was on a flight to San Diego. Pax asked Crew where we were flying to, as someone had said we were flying to San Diego. Crew said we were. He said another pax had insisted we weren’t. I was called to talk to the distressed passenger who I came from somewhere in India, as Crew were not quite sure why they were going around in circles with the same question. We were also not sure why he was so anxious, so we tried to get an Indian speaking Crew Member to talk to him one of the 4 Indian languages she knew. He spoke none of them. His English was not particularly good and with a very strong accent. We eventually established that he thought that he was on a flight to Santiago. It had obviously got lost in translation when he had booked his flight.

We contacted the ground staff and someone met him and his business partner on arrival. He was put up in a hotel overnight, canx his meeting in Santiago as he was only there for one night and BA put him on a flight to his next destination.

A colleague and I had been in Brasil, we both left Gig, I had a through flight to Lhr via Gru my colleague had to change for Cdg. In Gru they didn’t make you leave the plane if that aircraft was the one for your final destination.
My colleague soundly asleep stayed on, no one disturbed him, No passenger joining the flight had his seat number, he finally woke up 2 hours from JFK

Boarding at Sheremetyevo in the early 1970s, boarding gates had no destination sign above them. I was trying to board my Aeroflot flight to Tehran but was completely unsure it was the right gate. Meanwhile gate staff were rushing everyone on board at the last minute. Oh well I thought, let’s hope for the best. After takeoff the captain announced “Welcome on board this flight to Colombo… [5-second silence] …via Tehran”. Sigh of relief from me.